Today I left for Pasadena and the 20th iteration of the Southern California Linux Expo.

SCaLE is on of my favorite events of the year, and I’ve been coming (for the most part) since SCaLE 5x.

This year I’m giving a presentation on open source business models, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

I didn’t get to attend any of the sessions or activities on the first day, but I did manage to have dinner with some friends including Ilan Rabinovich, who is one of the main organizers of the event, and Stephen Walli, who works on the open source team at Microsoft. I also got to meet for the first time Amye Scavarda Perrin who is a program manager at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Ilan, Stephen, myself and Amye

While I think virtual conferences have a lot to offer in the way of education, I really do miss these opportunities to meet face to face and to interact with interesting people. I’m hoping that in-person events become more common in 2023.